


Precious As Diamonds

by Laurasauras



Category: Homestuck
Genre: A Perhaps Unrealistic Excusing Of Canon Flaws, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Feral Nepeta Leijon, First Meetings, Fluff, Meowrails, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-20
Updated: 2019-07-20
Packaged: 2020-07-09 01:44:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19879564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laurasauras/pseuds/Laurasauras
Summary: How Nepeta and Equius met.





	Precious As Diamonds

**Author's Note:**

> So, I might be writing away a lot of Equius's douchebaggery. But what else is fanfiction for? It's cute!

The hoofbeasts are exquisite. You have your bow and arrow just in case (and more realistically, your fists) but you would never dream of doing anything to hurt such beautiful creatures. The graceful line of their necks. The dance of their hooves. The curve of their which haunches, and the noble blue blood they bleed when—FUCK, you mean FIDDLESTICKS! That girl is attacking the hoofbeasts!

You take to your feet and hoof it after the girl, your strong gait causing the herd to scatter in all different directions. You keep the girl’s triangular horns in sight as you follow her, the orange and yellow a much easier contrast to follow on the white flank of the hoofbeast than grey skin and oh sweet heiress, that is a naked troll.

You trip over a rock that you didn’t see thanks to looking so carefully at anywhere that isn’t the depraved sight in front of you and you break your fall with your face. 

Well, this is a low point for you. You decide to wait until you have a bit more of your composure back before standing. 

And then you freeze, because suddenly you can feel rough hands and feet perched on your back. It’s too light to be a hoofbeast, so it must be the girl. She’s climbing on you with her hands and feet like an animal! 

‘Excuse me,’ you say, voice muffled by the fact that your face is pressed into the ground. ‘Kindly remove your trollhood from me.’

There’s an increase of pressure where one of her feet was, and then she’s off again. You get up immediately, not wanting a repeat performance, and scan the plain for her. It takes you a while to spot her, her bare skin almost providing a camouflage and she’s _fast_ , faster than you’d expect from an average troll. 

You chase after her. The herd has moved on, you were both far too noisy to avoid that, but she’s clearly got a new aim in sight. Even with your ludicrous amount of strength, you’re struggling to gain any ground on her. When she disappears into a copse of trees, you have to hope her path will stay relatively straight or you might lose her. 

You slow to a jog once you enter the trees, and then still, straining your ears for her. The trees are rainbow with the colour of second autumn, the shadows deepening as the moons inch closer to the horizon. You should be heading home. But you can’t leave this mystery be.

It’s so still you can hear the scrabble of nutbeasts as they clamber up the trees a healthy distance from you. The dust you kicked up in your run floats in the air in gentle circles. You’re isolated enough that Gl'bgolyb might have shrieked a glub loud enough to leave you alone on the planet. 

And then the cry of an enraged cholerbear rends the peace in two. You should run _away_ from that noise. But the girl … 

You run towards it, hating your curiosity more than you’ve ever hated anything. Why couldn’t you stick to your robotics? If you get through this, you’re going to make sure Aurthour grounds you for a month. 

You arrive at the scene, and your knees go weak with confusion and dismay. 

Where you’d assumed that the girl had angered the cholerbear and was either in danger or had already been killed, it’s actually the cholerbear who is leaking rust blood everywhere. 

You’re not a fan of blood, actually. You’ll grow into it someday, but seeing it come from a beast is especially hard. The beast hasn’t disobeyed a drone or angered a highblood. It doesn’t deserve this. 

The girl snaps the cholerbears neck and the awful gurgling, whining noise stops. She hops down from its body and turns to you, hands raised aggressively and teeth bared.

‘I’m not going to take that from you,’ you say, incredulously.

She relaxes somewhat, which is reassuring in that she can understand you. You decide to take advantage of that and pull a change of clothes from your sylladex. 

‘ _Please_ ,’ you say. ‘We live in a _society_.’

She grabs the shorts and tank from your outstretched hand and sniffs them curiously before pulling them on. The shorts fall right back down to her ankles, but the singlet is actually long enough to make her decent anyway. You breathe a sigh of relief. Now what to do about the giant slain behemoth and the approaching sunrise?

The girl abandons your spare shorts and approaches the cholerbear again. Now that you’ve assured her you aren’t going to take it from her (and really, she accepted that far too easily, does she not know trolls _lie_ ) she’s happy to turn her back on you and start cutting it into pieces that will fit into her sylladex.

‘Can you speak?’ you ask.

‘Yep!’ she says. Her voice is creaky with disuse, but it’s functional. That makes things easier. 

‘My name is Equius Zahhak,’ you say. ‘I live in the city and I’m a blueblood.’

You wait for her to return the courtesy. She keeps sawing through the creature’s shoulder.

‘And your name is?’

‘Nepeta,’ she says, not even turning from her task. Goodness, but she’s efficient.

*

You follow her back to her cave, even though it’s foolish of you. You correctly assumed that she knew to avoid sunlight and wouldn’t take advantage of her hardier midblood skin to get rid of you. 

Your poor lusus is probably worried. Your neighbour very well could be taking advantage of your absence to get up to hijinks. But this is important. You’re pretty sure this is important.

She ignored you for the entire journey to her cave, but once you’re inside she introduces you to her mom, sits you on a particular rock and gives you a wiggler’s teacup, far too small for either of you but frankly ridiculous in your hand. It’s empty, but she watches you expectantly until you mime drinking from it. She makes you poke your pinky out and grins at you delightedly.

Even if you hadn’t already been feeling _something_ , you think this gesture alone would have been enough to win you over. A savage girl, playing at highblood manners. She’s not in a regulation dwelling and she’s illegally hunting protected fauna, not to mention the fact that she’s clearly deprived of any kind of knowledge of society. If you were a good troll, you’d cull her before the imperial drones had to make the effort. 

‘Nepeta, are you familiar with quadrants?’ you ask tentatively. 

She looks up from the campfire she’s building and grins even wider than she did when you humoured her with the teacup. It’s still on your flat palm. You will not break one of her few treasures. 

‘Come see!’ she says, leaping to her feet and grabbing your hand. 

She’s strong enough to pull you upright, and though you don’t resist you think she could drag you wherever she liked. You follow her to the back wall of her cave and look at her for guidance for what exactly it is you have come to see.

But then your eyes adjust and you see art, some of it clumsy and simplistic and closer to the floor of the cave, but more complicated and confident in style as they get brighter (fresher paint?) and higher. Trolls, rarely the same ones repeated, holding hands or making claws at each other or touching each others’ faces.

‘Oh,’ you say.

‘Trolls go through my woods sometimes!’ Nepeta says. ‘Not friends, not Equius’s, but they have their own friends!’ Her eyes are massive with enthusiasm and straining to see in the dark.

You make an effort not to grind your teeth in your nervousness. You’ve never attempted to fill a quadrant before and you don’t know if you’re doing it right, but you can’t ignore the overwhelming need to protect her. To guard her like a precious diamond. 

You lift your hand and carefully pap down her cheek. Her mouth falls open in surprise, and a beat later she scrambles improbably up your body so that her arms are around your neck, toes balancing on your hip. You hold the hand with the teacup carefully away from her so you don’t drop it and your other hand hovers near her back, not daring to touch. 

She rubs her cheek against yours and purrs, needing almost no encouragement from you. You want to encourage her, want to relax enough to purr back, but you’re tense from the effort of not hurting anything. Your hand settles on her back and you pat her as gently as you can, twice. 

You’re going to dress her in as much blue as might press up against the limits of propriety. You’ll introduce her to normal troll customs and you’ll guide her wherever she might stray. You’ll have to be strict with her. She’s too trusting and too precious and you won’t let her get hurt. You can find her appropriate friends. 

Of course, that would be easier if you had your own friends. Perhaps your neighbour? She might be insane even for a cerulean, but she wouldn’t want to ruin your relationship, not when she relies on you to create her various death machines. And she seems the kind to have … social inclinations. 

Nepeta drops back to the cavefloor and resumes her firemaking. You sit next to her lusus and stroke her soft fur. It’s very important to make a good impression on your quadrants’ lusii. You’ve definitely heard that before. You can follow all the rules here and everything will be okay. 

You take another pretend sip from your teacup when she looks at you. You wonder if she’ll let you brush her hair next time you visit.


End file.
